


a marvellous thread

by arriviste



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-06-25 17:05:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19750039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arriviste/pseuds/arriviste
Summary: They called her Lúthien reborn before Arwen was old enough to understand that they were speaking a Doom, not a blessing.





	a marvellous thread

**Author's Note:**

> Daeron:  
> 'What wilt thou weave? What wilt thou spin?'  
> Lúthien:  
> 'A marvellous thread, and wind therein  
> a potent magic, and a spell  
> I will weave within my web that hell  
> nor all the powers of Dread shall break.'
> 
> (Lay of Leithian, Canto V)

They called her Lúthien reborn before Arwen was old enough to understand that they were speaking a Doom, not a blessing. 

“Her robe was blue as summer skies, but grey as evening were her eyes,” sang the harpist in the Hall of Fire, his head dipping in acknowledgment to Arwen at the high table. “It was sewn with golden lilies fair, but dark as shadow was her hair –”

She noticed that her father winced at the comparison long before she understood why. It seemed like rather obvious flattery; Lúthien the Starry-Mantled was their fore-mother, and it was her father’s hall. Of course the harpists sung of Lúthien Tinúviel’s dancing feet and looked meaningfully at Arwen, and it was not their fault that the compliments meant for her father went amiss somewhere in the sending.

As she grew older, the lines were sometimes for her benefit, not her father’s; “her body is fair, very white and fair,” one young flautist sung, his eyes on her, “white as the roses in Lúthien’s hair.” 

Black hair, grey eyes, fair skin: markers of Noldorin blood, as clear as a stamp from a common die. They were rare among the silver-fair people of Lothlórien, but still to be seen in her father’s house, among the last cluster of High-Elves and their children still lingering on this side of the Sea. 

Lúthien had not been Noldorin. Her dark hair had come from Melian the Queen, spun from the endless black of the void before the world, from the Timeless Halls beyond the Door of Night. Her grey eyes had come from Elu Grey-Cloak, who had ruled the dark and velvet lands of Beleriand under the light of the stars, long before the sun was born, when everything fair in colour must have seemed pale and faintly shining as a pearl.

Lúthien who had sang Morgoth into sleep and Mandos into pity; Lúthien who had died and been reborn; Lúthien who had gone beyond the reach of her people forever. It was no small mark to live up to, even when only lyrical praise. 

-

You cut the length of a thread, knot one end and pull the other through the eye of a needle. What will you make, and who will read it? Will you tell a story, or will your message be told in symbols? Do you want it to be open to any eyes to read, like a daisy in the sun, or to be cloaked in secret and shadow, holding its messages close like that same flower under the moon?

You choose your colours with care. The honey-colour of pomegranate rind, the yellow-gold of saffron. Mustard from marigolds, pink from camellias, reds from rose madder, orange from onion skins. Blue from indigo and elderberries, dogwood bark and red cabbage. Walnut-shells make the greyish-brown that Gildor’s men wear when they want to vanish into the sere land of winter before snow falls. You have a basket of skeins died dozens of different greens; new-leaf green from the stems of canna-lilies, the yellow-green of nettles, the deeper green of snapdragons. Yellow pimpernel, ragged-robin, wood sorrel, meadowsweet.

-

“I cannot tell you if you are like to Lúthien,” her mother said, and there was a line between her silver brows. “My far-cousin died long before my birth.”

“Nor I,” said her father; “I never knew her either, great-grandmother or not, and I would not think much on it, Arwen. Her shadow left this world long ago, and I would not have it linger over you.”

“Lúthien the lost, and more than lost,” golden Glorfindel said thoughtfully, because he was older than both her parents. “I never met her either - being rather less than welcome beyond the Girdle in the Elder Days! - so I cannot tell how much you resemble her, nor how much she resembled those images we have left of her. They show a fair-faced woman with a cloud of dark hair; I cannot tell you if those who wove or painted them ever saw her. There may have been better likenesses once, but much was lost in the fall of Doriath, and much more lost when Beleriand vanished below the sea.”

“Are they like her?” said her grandfather, in response to the easier question. Arwen noticed that his voice changed when he spoke of Lúthien, softening into an antique way of speech that made his _s_ and _th_ sounds blur like the wind moving through grass, and drew out his _els_ like a held note spooling and thinning into the distance. “No more than a blurred image seen through fog. But that is not the fault of either the weavers or the painters. Even in Menegroth the many-caved they could not capture her; she was always both more gentle and more terrible than her portraits.”

“Are you like to Lúthien?” her grandmother asked, and turned her piercing eyes on her. They were grey, Arwen knew, but that was not the colour they seemed to claim; they were clear as crystal and as seamed with captured light, and difficult to look into. “Who told you so?”

“A better question,” said Arwen, “would be who has not told me so.”

“I doubt they knew what they were speaking of,” said Galadriel. “Few of Doriath can be found now on the Hither Shore, and fewer still in the House of Elrond.” On the question of Lúthien’s likeness she would not speak, only to say that Arwen’s face was her own, and so too was her fate.

-

You embroider with meaning, too, in patterns and symbols and motifs. Always there are stars, blazing with fiery hearts or giving far-away radiance. Will you give them six rays, or eight? Wars have been fought over the question. For your Exile foremothers and forefathers, hard and shining jewels and coiling snakes, bleeding hearts and fiery suns, the spread wings of Eagles and their sharp golden eyes. For your Grey kin, leaves of oak and leaves of beech; the fleet beauty of a white hart in a black wood, the shine of pale niphredil in dark grass, of white moths rising in the night, the slim silver bodies of birch-trees. Sometimes they intertwine, the sun-gold and the moon-silver, the dark and the light. They touch when a white ship among the stars is met by a white bird, and the long, stylised white wings are themselves like the rays of light from the star-ship against the dark ground. 

\- 

_Again she fled, but swift he came;_  
_Tinúviel! Tinúviel!_  
_He called her by her elvish name;_  
_And there she halted listening._  
_One moment stood she, and a spel_ l  
_His voice laid on her: Beren came,_  
_And doom fell on Tinúviel_  
_That in his arms lay glistening._

-

“Why do you call me by that name?” she asked the stranger who had been singing of Lúthien under the birch-trees.

He was dark-haired, and his eyes were grey, and his face was very fair. He might have passed for her brother, or her cousin, but his youthful looks did not come from the eternal radiance of the elves. It was the freshness of mortality in the morning of its life, the brief blossom before the frost. 

There was such wonder in his eyes, like a man walking waking in a dream. 

He said, “Because I believed you to be indeed Lúthien Tinúviel, of whom I was singing. But if you are not she, then you walk in her likeness.”

“Many have said so,” Arwen said, but he had said it so simply and honestly that it sounded as fresh to her ears as he was to her eyes. “Yet her name is not mine; though maybe my doom will be not unlike hers.” 

That was the other side of the old story: Lúthien’s choice, Lúthien’s flight from the world, Lúthien’s eternal loss. The choice that lay dormant in her own blood, like seeds in winter ground, waiting for spring. She knew it was there, but she could not imagine it ever coming into flower.

He _was_ a cousin, she came to understand, as they walked together in her father’s garden, if one many generations apart from her. One of the hundred sons of Westernesse who passed through her father’s home like moths in the twilight and were replaced as quickly by their sons in turn. But this one seemed to her more beautiful than the ones who had come before.

“So you have met Estel,” said her father, looking at her later over his work. “He is well-loved here by all who have seen him grow; indeed, quite the youngest child of this house! You have come back from Lórien to find yourself supplanted, I fear.” His eyes were very warm, his gladness to have her home again lighting them and easing a little of the long strain at their corners.

“He is very young,” she agreed, and her father smiled. “He called me Tinúviel,” she added, and watched his smile fade.

-

It is more than needle and thread. You work with gold and silver wire, with beads of crystal, jet, diamond, with tiny hammered discs of gold in shining sequins. Celeborn your grandfather seems pained by this gem- and metal-work flowing from your hands, but he can find no fault in the fact that your hands hold a needle, not when the woman he once called queen under the stars decorated the thousand caves with tapestries of her own working. It is a quiet mingling of your own, dark and bright, bright and dark, gold and silver; the singing and twining threads of your family on both sides, caught here, twisted there, and here pulled apart to weave the story that has led to you. 

-  
When she met Estel again it was many years later, in Lórien, and he did not call her Lúthien. He was wearing the grey of its people, and there was a jewel on his brow bright as a star, but this time she could not have mistaken him for anything but mortal.

“ _Arwen,_ ” he said, and then, “My lady,” and something caught in her as he walked towards her under the gold and silver mallorns, his eyes still full of wonder. A catch in the throat; a catch in the heart. How strange it felt, to walk knowingly into the snare of her doom, and yet to do so with joy. To walk into a dream with her eyes open.

His face was touched now with years and pain and experience. There were lines in his face that had not been there before, and his face was sadder now, and sterner. This was a man who had travelled far, while she had dwelled in the peaceful gardens of her kind. He had seen war and death and unexpected victories, and crossed distant lands under a strange sun and taken ship into strange seas. He had seen evil, and great peril, and he had not faltered.

She had not changed in so many long centuries, and she had not changed since she had seen him last: and yet now she was changed, and changed forever.

“Arwen,” he said again, and when he smiled he was young once more.

He took her hands, and she gave them to him, and they were very white in the brown net of his fingers. 

-

You spin the thread for his standard yourself. There is a rhythm to spinning that is very old, repeated and repeating, by you, by others, back before the Sun and Moon. You sing as you work, and you wet the flax thread as you spin, and the bowl of water you are using is made of silver.

Estel lives under the Shadow, as does everyone yet living on this side of the Sea; but he lives in an obscurity still more profoundly dark. He is a sword in the night, a faceless stranger in the wilds of the North, a man using a name not his own when he fights in the South. For him, you will make your thread into cloth, and turn that cloth into a great dark ground on which brilliant deeds can shine forth all the clearer. 

Black is a difficult colour. Black takes work. Walnut dye gets you close, and so does iris, and but for true-black, you need more. You need oak-gall, and vinegar, and the rust of old iron, pounded into powder: skill, and knowledge, and art. 

Those are things that one side of your family favours more than the other, but the true-black made by metal and gall and hissing invisible operations adds velvet depth to your work the way the threads of mithril and gold will add brilliance. This is how you work; taking from both sides, in warp and weft, and making something new.

-

Her grandmother had taught Arwen water-working. Melian the Queen had taught her, and Galadriel had taught her own daughter, but Celebrían worked better with concrete things, with small hurts and small children and the trees and flowers that had turned to her as she passed through the woods. She had shown Arwen how to climb trees and to call animals, how to make fruit on the branch ripen in her hand.

Her grandmother showed Arwen her silver mirror, which was more than water in a silver bowl. Inside it Arwen saw the starlight on the Western Sea, and Lórien with its bloom lost and fallen from singing gold into grey ash. Her mother with tears on her face. Her father, a look on his face like the morning. Tall white towers shining like pearl; children's faces like small flowers. Her brother growing old, and whether it was Elladan or Elrohir, Arwen could not tell. There were too many reflected images, too many possibilities, too much joy and too much pain. 

“You need more focus,” Galadriel said, and then, “It may be that water is not your medium either, although I had thought it might be. There is water in you from me and from my mother, and the call of the sea is strong in your father’s line. You have the blood of Tuor and of Eärendil in you, and Elwing was not less close to the sea than he, although she cleaved at last to the air.”

“Lúthien worked with air,” Arwen said, and it was not quite a question. 

“Lúthien worked with Song in its purest form,” Galadriel said. “But it was dancing she loved, and dancing in Neldoreth that she helped her mother weave the Girdle and bring the Spring. She worked with air when she had little else easy to her hand; but that was also Song, and water, and weaving, too.”

That is what the songs say: in the beech-bower that was her prison, Lúthien washed her hair in water from a silver bowl, and in wine from a golden jar, and then she began to sing. She did not sing of beautiful things, but of giants and long shining cold-drakes, of the heights of Thangorodrim, and the chain that would bind Morgoth one day but which as yet was not shaped even in thought by any of the Shining Ones; and above all the long, long hair of Uinen of the Waters, as mazy as the mists around Doriath. Her hair grew in the dark as long as any of these things, and whether the power was in the water in her silver bowl, or the Song, or the things she called upon that were not kind or bright, the shining blood of Lúthien herself, was not clear, but grow it did.

And Lúthien spun her black hair into thread, and the thread into cloth, and of that cloth she made a black cloak. Everyone its shadow touched fell into deepest sleep, and it was like dark wings on her back when she flew through the air.

-

You have a fine black standard now, dark as Night, and every stitch of it is from your hand. It is dark, but it is a black that is waiting for the stars to appear. 

You stretch it on a frame for working, and then you take up your pen, chalk trimmed for a goose-feather quill, and think about what you are going to say, the man it will be for, and what others must be able to read in it.

You do not sing about Lúthien when you work. You think about Estel’s grey eyes, and the broken sword that lies so heavy on his mind. You think about all the sons of Westernesse who have passed through this, your father’s house, whose hurts were tended by your mother before she went over the sea, who were trained in arms by your brothers, schooled and taught by your father. You never tried to know them as closely. You knew there could only be pain in knowing mortals so well, in guiding their small steps in the morning and folding their cold hands in the evening.

There is a song about those men and what they brought with them from the lost Land of Gift, lost and more than lost, and that is what you sing as you work: seven stars, and seven stones, and one white tree.

-

She did not need to tell her father what fate she had found in Lórien when she came home to Imladris. He saw it in her face, and she saw it in his, the knowledge of her heart’s choice like an early breath of winter creeping into a summer garden. But if she was not Lúthien, he was not Elu Grey-Cloak, to cage her like a bird and hold her tight.

-

Seven stars, and seven stones, and one white tree: and the winged crown of the Sea Kings of Númenor. It is a private act, your crafting of this standard, and a secret one, and it makes you feel vulnerable, like you are holding out your heart in your own two hands. You are giving your dearest hope shape and form in the world in every stitch, giving it being, when it is still only a shadow of a shadow of a chance, the slimmest of the slimmest of hopes. You are making a banner for Gondor’s lost king returned in a time of great darkness and waiting, when that city does not yet know that it wants him, when that king is not yet that: when the man you love is far away, in great peril and danger under the Eye.

Your thread travels through the black cloth making stitches like footprints, leaving its mark as the silver needle pierces again and again, pushing through from one place to the next. You sing of him as you work, and of his journey, and your thoughts are with him. You sing of safety, of hooked swords slipping and black arrows turning aside; you sing of hope, of dark armies washing up against the walls of a white city and being broken on them, of a man with a star on his brow and the green stone of your promise on his breast. You call on Elbereth as you sew. 

There is a method to it. You embroider first from bottom to top to follow the path of life, and you use always the same needle that started the work, and keep it in the silver case at your waist; it must be the needle that that finishes it. Every stitch matters, and each one has meaning. There is seed-stitch, and fern-stitch, coral-stitch and feather-stitch, cloud-filling stitch and star-stitch. Every stitch you place is a binding, and a note in the Song. Every stitch you place is a private hope turned into stars. 

Weaving is your working, and you are like Lúthien in this, and unlike her. You will not fly out of the window of your bower to your Beren, but what shining blood sings in your veins you will pour out and send to him.

-

At the Stone of Erech, Aragorn who was Estel first named himself King of Gondor, and unfurled the great black standard woven by Arwen daughter of Elrond to declare it, and there was power behind his words. In the shadow under the hollow hill her design did not shine, but the Dead followed the man and the standard out of the darkness and into legend.

On the Pelennor Fields, the black standard was unfurled again, and again his claim was made, and in the bright light of the morning the tree was silver and the winged crown was gold, and the seven stars wrought in jewels blazed with pale fire, and not only the Dead but the living followed them into battle. 

-

You walk to Estel in the white city which is now his, and will be yours, and that other white city on a far shore falls away from you with every step. You do not know which one you saw in your grandmother’s mirror, but this is the city you have chosen, and you are married in it under a bright Midsummer sky, and that night the stars flower in radiance.

-

“Was Beren very like to Estel?” Arwen asked her grandfather in the bright days after her wedding in Gondor.

“To – _Beren_?” Celeborn asked, ancient face full of surprise; and then he laughed. “No, not at all.”

“Not at _all_?”

"Estel is already far older than Beren lived to be. Taller, too! You and your husband are much of a height, but Beren was entirely a man, and Lúthien was taller than he by far. I liked him very much; but was he like your husband? He too spent many years fighting a long war almost alone, in the blasted lands of Dorthonion; he, too, could pull nature around him like a cloak, and moved through the woods like a whisper. He was wild, but he was honourable; he was kind, but fierce. 

"Above all, though, Beren was young, in a way I do not think Estel has been for many years, and he burnt through his brief life as though he had never heard of patience. He had lost his lands, and been touched greatly by sorrow; but he had nothing but his own life left to fight for, his own fate to make and to shape, while your Estel has been weighted down by the past and the pattern of his ancestors since he was a very young man. He has long felt responsibility for his people in the north, and his people in the south, and been bound by great fear and great Doom. I did like Beren; but he was a very different man."

“That is not the answer I expected,” Arwen said, and thought of Estel’s fair young face in her father’s gardens before he had known of his true birth, and of his face in Lórien, with all the marks of his doom in it, and how the one had touched her, but the other pierced her through. 

“I gather not,” said her grandfather. “The Lay of Leithian has been played very often in this city since you came into it to be married; but your story is your own, Arwen.” He paused. “You have never asked me if you are like to Lúthien.”

“You have never told me that I am,” said Arwen, "although many others have done so."

“You do _look_ very like her,” Celeborn said, and his eyes on her face were gentle. “That is true; but you are not her. You were born in an age of fading and falling, and you have lingered long in the gardens of your father and mine, in small circles of light in a greater shadow. You have gone deep, not wide, and found your way in your work. Lúthien was born in Neldoreth in a time before the Girdle, in free Beleriand, in the time of stars when we did not fear the night, and Melian’s hand was on us, and Elu’s eyes and hair shone silver in the dark, and she was as wild as Beleriand was. 

"Nothing trammelled Lúthien by so much as a hair in those days, or tied a thread to her; one might as well have tried to sing the wind into a bag and shut it up. She led the hunt when we went baying through the forests, and she came dancing home through the trees with the blood from the kill warm on her face. She was scatheless until the day she met Beren, and then she went flying from him because she feared the net of her doom as a wild thing fears the snare. She loved him, and it bound her in a way she had never before been bound, and opened the door for her to fear, and tenderness, and loss. And yet in the end that love freed her to go beyond the cage of this world, and wild as she was, I believe she went as gladly from that cage as you went to your wedding.”

Arwen did not think she would go as lightly from the world. It would be an undoing; a thread pulled from the long-woven web of Arda, an end that would not be woven back in. The pattern had been very beautiful.

“Your path is your own, Arwen, even if you have followed some way in her footsteps,” said her grandfather; “even as Beren himself did through the woods and wilds of Neldoreth as she fled. Lúthien did not build, and nor did Beren. You and your husband have a new world to make in a new age, and a new line to found, and a new kingdom to craft from the old and the long-sundered, and I know you to be skilled in hand and mind as well as in song.”

“It will be very long in the making,” Arwen said, "and my years will be short;" but it caught her imagination, the world that her hands and Estel's would make, and beyond the white tower, the sun was still rising.

-

There is a new white tree in this white city, barely a sapling. You call it into blossom like your mother would have, with a song of that other city where the towers gleam like pearl. In a courtyard full of fountains, like this one and not like this one, a white tree blooms. It is Tirion where Galadriel your grandmother was born, which you will never see, and it is not. It is Gondolin where Earendil your grandfather was born, gone first in fire and then in flood, and it is not. It is Armenelos where Elros ruled and your husband’s line came into flower, sent below the sea forever, and it is not; and it is all of them, and something new.

**Author's Note:**

> Certain lines from The Lay of Leithian - in italics, and in the quoted songs - and some brief dialogue from The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen. Embroidery and natural dye facts from many places, but especially Claire Hunter's Threads of Life.
> 
> Tumblr is [here](https://arrivisting.tumblr.com) but I am very bad at it because very busy with academia always!
> 
> I know Tolkien ended up taking the bleeding heart out of Turgon's iconography, but I like it too much.


End file.
